Why Did Quickbooks Fail To Restore a Backup?
Quickbooks offers fast and simple backups to ensure the protection of your data in the event of a hard drive crash, system failure, theft or computer damage. After performing a backup, all of your specified data will be consolidated into a convenient “QBB” format for later use. You can then store this QBB backup file remotely on a cloud, USB flash drive, CD, DVD or anywhere else you choose. However, some users may run into an error when attempting to restore their backups. Although it’s somewhat uncommon, users may experience a “failed to restore backup” message, indicating that something is wrong.
Compatibility Issues
First and foremost, it’s important to note that restores may fail if you are attempting to restore a backup file from a previous version of Quickbooks. If one version of Quickbooks is installed on your computer, but the backup file was created using a different version, the two may experience compatibility issues which cause the failure. Check to see what version of Quickbooks was used to create the backup fail and compare it to your current version.
Restoring Backups With Compatibility Issues
The good news is that you can still restore backup files creates from a different version of Quickbooks. It’s a little more time consuming, but it’s certainly better than losing all of your data. From the Quickbooks start screen, choose “File,” “Maintenance,” and “Restore Backup For Earlier Version of Quickbooks.” Next, click the “Browse” button to find the necessary Quickbooks backup file on your computer or disc drive. If you are unable to find it, press F3 on your desktop to search for the file. You must know the location of your backup file if you intend on performing a restore.
Before you attempt to open your Quickbooks backup file, you should first give it a new file name with a “.qbw” extension. This will essentially modify the file so it’s compatible with your version of Quickbooks. When you are finished, click “Save,” followed by “Ok.” Your new backup file should be ready for restoring, and now that it has a “.qbw” extension, it should restore without any errors or problems.
If the steps listed above did not solve your restore error, you may need to take a different approach towards fixing the problem. Quickbooks offers a free-to-download conversion tool available on their website that’s intended to fix errors such as this. Visit their website and download the tool by clicking on this link. Once the tool is downloaded, run the .exe file to install it on your hard drive. This tool will automatically convert older backup files into newer ones, allowing you to perform a successful restore. It’s important to note, however, that the Quickbooks conversion tool is only compatible with backups created from Quickbooks 2007, 2008 and 2009. If the backup was created from a newer version, you’ll have to use the conversion tool found in Quickbooks 2010.